UN Sanctions May Play Into North Korean Propaganda
ublished: March 8, 2013 at 7:01 PM ET
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Seven years of U.N. sanctions against North Korea have done nothing to derail Pyongyang's drive for a nuclear weapon capable of hitting the United States. They may have even bolstered the Kim family by giving their propaganda maestros ammunition to whip up anti-U.S. sentiment and direct attention away from government failures.
In the wake of fresh U.N. sanctions leveled at North Korea on Thursday
for its latest nuclear test, the question is: Will this time be
different?
Since 2006, North Korea has launched long-range rockets, tested a
variety of missiles and conducted three underground nuclear explosions,
the most recent on Feb. 12. Through it all, Pyongyang has been
undeterred by a raft of sanctions — both multilateral penalties from the
United Nations and national sanctions from Washington, Tokyo and others
— meant to punish the government and sidetrack its nuclear ambitions.
A problem with the approach, analysts said, is that outsiders routinely
underestimate North Korea's knack for survival. The sanctions are
intended to make life more difficult for a country that has crushing
poverty, once suffered through a devastating famine and lost its Soviet
backers long ago, but Pyongyang often manages to find some advantage.
North Korean citizens are both defiant and dismissive about sanctions.
"The sanctions are a trigger, a confrontation," said Kim Myong Sim, a
36-year-old who works at Pyongyang Shoe Factory. "History has shown that
Korea has never even thrown a stone at America, but the U.S. still
continues to have a hostile policy toward my country."
If North Koreans have "the respected general's order, we will wipe
Washington from the Earth," she said, referring to leader Kim Jong Un.
She said North Koreans have "already suffered sanctions in the past, but
we have found our own way and have become self-reliant."
Sanctions "may be doing more to strengthen the regime than hasten its
demise," according to a 2011 essay by John Delury and Chung-in Moon,
North Korea specialists at Yonsei University in Seoul.
"They have generally been counterproductive by playing into Pyongyang
hardliners' argument that U.S. hostility is the root cause of North
Korea's predicament, providing an external enemy to blame for all woes
and undercutting initiatives by more moderate forces in the North Korean
elite who want to shift the focus more toward economic development,"
Delury said in an interview Friday.
Indeed, North Korea has unleashed a torrent of propaganda in the wake of
the U.N. Security Council resolution, seizing on the sanctions as
evidence of Washington's attempt to bring down North Korea by "disarming
and suffocating it economically."
"The world will clearly see what permanent position (North Korea) will reinforce as a nuclear weapons
state and satellite launcher as a result of the U.S. attitude of
prodding the UNSC into cooking up the 'resolution,'" an unidentified
Foreign Ministry spokesman said in a statement released by state media
Saturday.
The resolution targets North Korea's ruling class by banning nations
from exporting expensive jewelry, yachts, luxury automobiles and race
cars to the North. It also imposes new travel sanctions that would
require countries to expel agents working for certain North Korean
companies.
Diplomats at the U.N. boasted that the sanctions resolution sends a
powerful message to North Korea's young leader. "These sanctions will
bite, and bite hard," U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice said.
But they may also play into Kim Jong Un's hands.
With the outside world clamoring to punish North Korea, Kim can build
the same image his late father, Kim Jong Il, looked to create — that of a
strong leader developing nuclear weapons despite outrage from the U.S.
superpower, said Ahn Chan-il, a political scientist who heads the World
Institute for North Korea Studies in Seoul.
"We have been living with sanctions for a long time, so we're used it,"
Jang Jun Sang, a department director at the Ministry of Public Health,
told The Associated Press in an interview in Pyongyang late last month.
He acknowledged that sanctions have cut imports of medical equipment and
supplies. But he said North Korea would find ways to cope. "If we
receive medical aid, that's good," he said. "But if we don't, that's
fine, too. We're not worried."
The U.N. Security Council issued the latest sanctions because Pyongyang
violated earlier resolutions barring it from conducting nuclear or
missile tests. The council passed those measures because it considers
North Korea's nuclear testing a threat to international peace and
stability.
North Korea dismisses that as a double standard, and claims the right to
build nuclear weapons as a defense against the United States, which it
blames for leading the push for sanctions.
Pyongyang said before the U.N. vote that it would scrap the armistice
that ended the Korean War, and after the vote issued a statement saying
it was canceling a hotline and a nonaggression pact with rival South
Korea.
The U.N. tries to tailor its sanctions to punish the leadership, not
average North Koreans. But it's an imperfect exercise.
The latest sanctions will squeeze North Korea's already meager exports
and imports, which will in turn cause pain for citizens, said Cho
Bong-hyun, a research fellow at the IBK Economic Research Institute in
Seoul.
"North Korea's economy faces so many difficulties already, and it can
get even worse (because of the sanctions)," Cho said.
A glimpse of North Korean thinking on sanctions can be seen in a wave of
recent angry threats from North Korea. Fierce language associated with
the specter of yet more sanctions leveled at the North by Washington and
its allies feeds into an us-against-the-world mentality.
It is meant to "solidify Kim Jong Un's leadership by creating a state of
quasi-war and tension," said Koh Yu-hwan, a North Korea expert at
Seoul's Dongguk University.
Immediately before the Security Council vote, a spokesman for
Pyongyang's Foreign Ministry said the North will exercise its right for
"a pre-emptive nuclear attack to destroy the strongholds of the
aggressors" because of the U.S.-led push for sanctions and U.S.-South
Korean joint military drills.
The primary intended audience for such rhetoric is often not outsiders but North Koreans.
When a crisis looms, soldiers, officials and propaganda writers vie with
each other to show their extreme loyalty to, and to win promotion and
praise from, the ruling Kim family.
Analyst Baek Seung-joo, of the South Korean state-run Korea Institute
for Defense Analyses, said it's "like a loyalty competition."
One caveat to the sanctions dilemma is China, which is North Korea's
economic lifeline, providing almost all the country's oil and generous
amounts of food aid.
Pyongyang's dependency on Beijing has grown as sanctions have piled up.
Chinese products made up only about 43 percent of North Korean imports
in 2006, compared to more than 95 percent in 2012, according to data
from the International Trade Centre. The group, a joint agency of the
U.N. and the World Trade Organization, said more than $3.5 billion in
Chinese exports reached North Korea last year.
Beijing's backing for the new measures signals its growing frustration with its neighbor and ally.
"In the past, we opened our eyes and closed our eyes as need be. Now
we're not closing our eyes anymore," said Cui Yingjiu, a retired
professor from Peking University in China and a former classmate of Kim
Jong Il.
But Chinese leaders have been wary of putting too much pressure on
Pyongyang for fear that the Kim government would collapse, sending North
Koreans streaming across the border and potentially leading to the loss
of a buffer against a U.S.-allied South Korea.
If China changes course and rigorously enforces the U.N. resolution, "it
could seriously disrupt, if not end, North Korea's proliferation
activities. Unfortunately, if past behavior is any guide, this is
unlikely to happen," Marcus Noland, a North Korean watcher at the
Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, said in an
institute blog post.
___
Guttenfelder reported from Pyongyang, North Korea. AP writers Hyung-jin
Kim, Sam Kim and Youkyung Lee in Seoul, Jean H. Lee in Pyongyang and
Charles Hutzler in Beijing contributed to this report. Follow Klug on
Twitter: (at)APKlug
After U.N. Vote on Sanctions, 2 Koreas Ratchet Up Threats
By CHOE SANG-HUN and RICK GLADSTONE
North Korea responded angrily to a decision to impose tightened
sanctions, saying it was nullifying all nonaggression agreements with
South Korea.
Brendan McDermid/Reuters
The Security Council approved stringent new economic sanctions on North Korea on Thursday.
By CHOE SANG-HUN and RICK GLADSTONE
Published: March 8, 2013
SEOUL, South Korea — Angrily responding to the United Nations Security Council’s unanimous decision to impose tightened sanctions, North Korea said on Friday that it was nullifying all nonaggression agreements with South Korea, with one of its top generals claiming that his country had nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles ready to blast off.Multimedia
Related
-
South Korea Pushes Back on North’s Threats (March 7, 2013)
Matching the harsh warning with a toughened stance, South Korea said
Friday that if Pyongyang attacked the South with a nuclear weapon, the
government of the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un would be “erased from
the earth.”
Such language marked the most hostile exchange between the two Koreas,
still technically at war, since they engaged in an artillery skirmish
three years ago.
The verbal warfare represented a clash of nerves between the young North
Korean leader, who is building his credentials as head of his
militaristic country, and Park Geun-hye, South Korea’s first female
president, who considers former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of
Britain her role model and has stressed security as her top priority.
While weapons experts say North Korea does not have the technical
capability to use nuclear-tipped missiles, that did not stop it from
threatening their deployment.
“With their targets set, our intercontinental ballistic missiles and
other missiles are on a standby, loaded with lighter, smaller and
diversified nuclear warheads,” said Kang Pyo-yong, a three-star general
and vice defense minister of North Korea. “If we push the button, they
will blast off and their barrage will turn Washington, the stronghold of
American imperialists and the nest of evil, and its followers, into a
sea of fire.”
His comment, made in a speech before a large rally in Pyongyang on
Thursday, was carried by the North’s main party newspaper, Rodong
Sinmun, on Friday.
In the last few days, North Korea’s state-run news media have carried a
slew of official remarks threatening to launch “pre-emptive nuclear
strikes” at Washington and Seoul with “lighter and smaller nukes,”
hinting that the country has built nuclear warheads small enough to
mount on long-range missiles. But American and South Korean officials
strongly doubt that North Korea has mastered that technology, despite
its successful launching of a long-range rocket in December and its third nuclear test last month.
South Korean military officials called the remarks a bluster, designed
not so much to threaten Washington as to infuse its population with a
sense of both crisis and empowerment as Mr. Kim consolidates his grip on
North Korea. On its front page, the Rodong newspaper carried a large
picture showing North Korea’s new generation of mobile missiles.
South Korea’s new leader warned that with its behavior, North Korea was only hurting itself.
North Korea “will collapse in self-destruction if it continue to waste its resources on nuclear weapons
development while its people are going hungry,” Ms. Park said during a
commission ceremony for young military officers on Friday. She promised a
“strong response” to any provocation, but also offered a cooperative
future if North Korea changed.
Also Friday, North Korea said it was also nullifying all
denuclearization agreements with South Korea and cutting off the
North-South hot line, in retaliation for the United Nations sanctions
and the joint military exercises South Korea is staging with the United
States.
But beyond North Korea’s belligerent statements, it was unclear how, if at all, Mr. Kim would react to the sanctions.
Any North Korean military action could end up involving the American
forces that have remained in South Korea as it has turned from
war-ravaged ruin into one of the most advanced industrialized
powerhouses.
The 15-to-0 Security Council vote places potentially painful new
constraints on North Korean banking, trade and travel, pressures
countries to search suspect North Korean cargo and includes new
enforcement language absent from previous measures. But the provisions
are in some ways less important than China’s participation in writing
them, suggesting that the country has lost patience with the neighbor it
supported in the Korean War. While China’s enforcement of sanctions on
North Korea remains to be seen, it may now be more assertive.
“This is not about the words, it is about the music,” said Christopher
R. Hill, the former American diplomat who negotiated a deal with the
North during the George W. Bush administration to dismantle its nuclear
facilities — an accord that quickly collapsed. China’s cosponsorship of
the resolution “suggests that after many years, the screws are beginning
to turn,” said Mr. Hill, now the dean of the Josef Korbel School of
International Studies at the University of Denver.
Still, another North Korean nuclear test is possible, as is another
ballistic missile launching or perhaps an armed provocation aimed at
South Korea, where Ms. Park, the daughter of a former South Korean
dictator who was known for taking a hard stand with the North, could be
forced to respond. Some regarded the North’s dire warnings as a signal
that some military response was looming.
Justin Lane/European Pressphoto Agency
The United States envoy to the United Nations, Susan
E. Rice, with her British counterpart, Sir Mark Lyall Grant, at the
vote.
Multimedia
Related
-
South Korea Pushes Back on North’s Threats (March 7, 2013)
“The higher decibel of invective is a bit worrisome,” said Bill Richardson, the former governor of New Mexico and presidential candidate, who has traveled to North Korea eight times, most recently in January.
“It’s the highest negative level I’ve ever seen, and it probably means
that the hard-line elements, particularly the military and not the
Foreign Ministry, are in control.”
On the other hand, Mr. Richardson said, “China is part of a significant
sanctions effort, and this may cool the North Koreans down, may temper
their response.”
It is also possible that the new and isolated North Korean government
may have misjudged the reaction to talk of a pre-emptive nuclear attack,
wording rarely heard since the cold war ended. It could be another way
in which the North is demanding talks with President Obama — only last
week Mr. Kim told Dennis Rodman, the visiting former basketball star,
that he wanted Mr. Obama to call him. But it could also be a way of
saying that North Korea now expected to be treated the way Pakistan is:
as an established, if formally unrecognized, nuclear power.
“This is a tactic they have employed when they don’t get their way, when
the international community brings more sanctions to bear,” said Suzanne DiMaggio,
vice president of global policy programs at the Asia Society in New
York. “Whether that will happen this time is unclear, given the level of
hostile rhetoric,” she said. “I’m not sure Pyongyang recognizes that
fact.” The United Nations vote and North Korea’s threat come at a time
when, internally, the Obama administration is debating the wisdom of its
policy of essentially ignoring the North for the past four years, and
responding to any provocations with new sanctions.
According to current and former administration officials, there is a
growing discussion within the White House, the State Department and the
Pentagon over whether Mr. Kim is using each new test of rockets and
nuclear devices to solidify his position with the military, his most
important single constituency. “Under that theory,” one official who has
dealt with North Korea often said recently, “even a firefight with the
South Koreans might help him, as long as it doesn’t escalate into
something that threatens the regime.”
In testimony on Thursday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
Glyn T. Davies, the administration’s special representative for North
Korea policy, argued that the best course was to continue with Mr.
Obama’s current policy of using tests and provocations to tighten
sanctions, and try to starve development of the North’s long-range
missiles and its effort to design nuclear weapons small enough for those
missiles.
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